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Do you recycle? I don't even have the option. (Also incentivizing "green" behavior)
spacekungfuman
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
I know this sounds like a crazy thread to have in 2012, but I don't recycle at home. It isn't because I don't want to. I can't. I live in a private community that pays for private waste removal, and we don't contract with a recycling company. I know other people in private communities in the same predicament, but I also know people in public communities where they either not collect recycling, or don't collect recycling on a regular basis, which makes it hard for people to recycle. At the same time, as much as I don't want to throw my plastic bottles into garbage cans when I am out, it can be next to impossible to find a recycling bin in many places. Does anyone else face simmiliar problems, or have ideas about what we can be doing as a society to make recycling easier and more efficient?
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I'm not faulting you spacekungfuman, but it boils down to money. The more people that hop on the recycling bandwagon, the cheaper it will get (for example, it's dirt cheap in the Pacific Northwest and is included in garbage). The problem is just crossing that initial hump.
Excuse me while I wipe this smudge off the side of my ivory tower.
Everything besides aluminium cans gets trashed.
It feels really awkward to throw cardboard boxes and old papers away, so I actually load them in my car and bring them home to throw in the paper/cardboard recycling bins.
There's a recycling place across the street from us, but they don't recycle paper. (WTF?)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Or I've been misled by eco terrorists, but I recommend doing research on any recycling company you choose to go with.
edit: Went to go factcheck my statement. http://www.alternet.org/environment/141777/5_recycling_myths_shattered/
So just be careful with who/where you recycle. Not all recycling is equal and wonderful.
Ah you watched Penn & Teller too? It's mostly the collection of the goods because it eats away at the gas. If we were really hard pressed for paper/cardboard/glass I would absolutely agree. Seems it'd be better to just throw away those and recycle metals.
It's mostly a cost thing. My county decided to tax TV disposal. It costs $70 to throw away a TV. Any TV.
Batteries? If I bring batteries and not save them all year for the yearly free one that occurs in a narrow window of 4 hours, I have to pay something like $25 per lb or something insane like that. TVs too.
It's gotten to the point now where people drive randomly to people's parking lots and just dump old TVs in the middle of them. Glass everyfuckingwhere. And the businesses have to pay that $70 to get rid of it now. The semi-local grocery store here (Wegmans) actually has TV collections a few times a year for free, and they put up a big container to drop used batteries into too. At least my local one does anyways.
Guys, I am going to graduate school, I regularly run 14 hour+ days, and they don't pick recycling up at my apartment complex.
I have three buckets in a closet in my house to sort my recyclables, along with a bunch of bags. I clean out all my cans and plastic bottles etc and sort them. When those bags and buckets get full I drive to a different town to recycle them.
My point here isn't "I am so much better than you environmentalistsmug.gif"
My point is that I don't want to hear about how you can't seem to find a recycling bin that is convenient. Does your town not have a recycling facility? That is something to complain about, not that it doesn't get picked up at your house.
If you really cared you would pre-sort at home and make a weekly or bi-weekly trip to the recycling center. Both places where I have worked (admittedly one was a hospital and one was a university) also had recycling facilities, or at least bins, on campus. If I couldn't make my weekly recycling run I would take what I could carry to work and recycle it there.
Again, for both of these- if your complex doesn't have recycling, and you really want to recycle there are options guys. Don't just give up so easily and then complain about how you really want to recycle but just can't.
This is a slightly different problem, but one that I don't think is going to get fixed. See, my campus tried to green itself by having recycling bins next to the trash cans, but it turns out that people wouldn't pay attention and would throw whatever they felt like in either bin, and if your recycling is too dirty or full of gross things, they just end up tossing it out at the plant.
Again, lack of apartment recycling pickup and lack of easy recycling bins does not mean it is impossible to recycle.
Check with your local recycling facilities to find out their hours, how they want you to handle the materials you bring them, and ask them what you can do about getting other options for recycling collection that may be more convenient.
And if there isn't a more convenient option? Either suck it up and make a trek to a recycling facility, or stop saying that you really want to recycle but just can't.
Sorry if I am sounding like an asshole, but I really hate this excuse. Which is what it is.
I guess I'm a bit uneducated on this subject. I argued plastic should be recycled if nothing else because it lowers our dependency on foreign oil, but he didn't seem to be buying it. Then again, we went off on a tangent about Peak Oil (him saying technology would prevent or delay it almost indefinitely, me saying that we haven't had a large deposit discovery in 30-40 years).
Educate me oh PA forums.
Edit: It's also incredibly easy to recycle your own paper if you feel like it
Batteries are a pain to recycle, though. I have to remember to take them into Uni where there's a box by the grocery store. Anything else, like clothes or shoes or whatever, there's a bunch of recycling skip things at the local shops (a couple of minutes walk away).
http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/recycling
Locally, we have curbside pickup for normal recycling (cardboard, plastic, metal) and the dump has a recycling area where you can get rid of just about anything, including used motor oil, car batteries, and miscellaneous toxic chemicals. For free!
Sure, it means property taxes are higher, but I'd rather have higher taxes than a watershed devoid of life.
Why do you hate our freedoms? Clearly, you're an evil communist.
The recycling center is next to a grocery store, so I take the recycling when I get groceries.
Shoulda said that.
Here is something I keep bookmarked: http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/apartment-compost-guide.htm
Not all places give you money for it, but I agree with your sentiment.
As to "what" we should recycle- paper is problematic, it is true. I would still think we should recycle, as well as buy recycled paper materials more often due to the way that most paper is harvested.
Energy cost be damned, plastics, electronics, and metals should definitely be recycled. They can't biodegrade, they generally leach toxins, and they are finite resources.
BUY RECYCLED GOODS
Make a conscious effort to pick up recycled plastic bottles, recycled paper, basically anything made of post-consumer materials.
Yes yes, it is part of the huge "go green" marketing trend these days...but if you don't buy recycled products, there is no reason for recycling to exist in the first place.
Many schools, grocery stores, Wal-marts, etc etc have recycling dumpsters outside of their buildings. Just haul your stuff there every so often and there you go.
It doesn't need to be picked up at your doorstep.
Spacekungfuman, you most likely do have the option to recycle, you just don't have the option to recycle from the comfort of your own home.
PM the city where you live, and I can summarize the options available to you, or just post it in the thread if you feel comfortable with that.
Look, you can get calluses from handling all that recycling. What do you want my neighbors to think, that I'm a manual laborer?
Don't do this unless it is actually designated as a public dumpster. It is a crime to dump trash and recycling in a business's dumpster without their permission
It also depends on how you deal with your trash otherwise. In our extremely densely populated country we burn most of our trash for electricity / heat and since those plants are already in place there are actually some issues where if were to sort out all the burnable bits out of the trash, we'd lose the relatively cheap/clean energy (Note the relative there) and would instead have to store the 'wet' waste at higher cost.
Most people can probably do a whole lot more environmentally good with their time/money in general. Isolating their houses, being smart with electricity, what and how they drive where and especially what they eat (beef and cheese = bad!) all have potentially much bigger impacts.
They give you +1 to minerals and energy. (Sometimes more depending on the Social Engineering Options your Coop board chooses)
"Hi, do you recycle monitors?" /holding huge CRT
"Yes, we'ill do it for $75-100."
"Oh ok, Ill be right back with my checkbook" /sets CRT down, walks out, drives away
When I worked at radioshack we would recycle batteries for free, we had boxes behind the register we would just bag them and throw them in a box till it was full, then mailed the prepaid box out.
I remember when living in NOVA in 1993 and having to recycle everything, plastic/glass/cans, and we even had to seperate newspapers. We still do not recycle in SWVA.... in the county or city.
Go to the public recycling bins that are undoubtedly located all the fuck over every town in america?
So the basic version of it is that recycling metals is generally enormously profitable, especially aluminum due to the energy requirements of extracting it from bauxite and the fact that it is easy to seperate impurities in metals.
Plastics can be recycled, but a big problem is sorting all of the various types of plastics, which must generally be done by hand (there are some technologies in the pipe to attempt to automate this, but IIRC they aren't very good yet). The resulting plastic is generally not that good either. One option is to use it to generate energy though via controlled burn (pyrolisis I believe it is called, all of this is off the top of my head).
Paper too can be recycled, but again it suffers from huge quality issues since every time you recycle paper the fiber length of the resultant mash is shortened. That is why virtually nothing 'green' uses 100% post-consumer paper. In addition paper is renewable and the US at least does a decent, if not perfect, job of husbanding forests.
Glass recycling frankly sucks and IMO we should just abandon recycling it. If you can get people to actually bring in the bottles intact for complete re-use it is good, but that is pretty hard nowadays. Recycling it at a center is horrid. You cannot reform glass from disparate glass types without introducing structural weaknesses in the subsequent product. So you have to carefully sort the glass in order to resmelt it. Or else you can just grind it up and use it for things like road beds. Also adding it into single-stream recycling systems means that you need to beef up your safety and handling procedures (read, spend more $$$) to account for breakage. On top of this, glass itself is inert and the raw materials for producing it are abundant so the case for recycling it isn't as strong.
I think in the end I advocated ending the current subsidy models for recycling and investing more in directed materials research to try and make the end-products of the recycling stream higher quality and less costly to produce by reducing the need for manuar labor.
Truth. As soon as you found a colony on land, you should immediately build a Recycling Center.
In all seriousness, Saammiel, that was a great post.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But no taxes mirite!!!1! Stupid NH.
We recycle about 3 times as much stuff as we through out (compost also but that's a distant third). Its pretty universal on my street, which is a very middle class, middle of the road suburban neighborhood, to have at least as many recycling barrels (or twice as many bins) as trash barrels. Recycling is every other week, trash every week so we still usually have a half full trash barrel each week but we put out 4 bins and usually a few paper bags of recycling, not including deposit bottles/cans which go to the supermarket.
And I'm pretty damn lazy about stuff like that. It takes nearly zero effort and does an obvious, unalloyed good. The fact that its not universal in the US (hell that trash pickup isn't universal) is proof that people are dumb.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
This is really how every state should do it.
So no... don't make an extra car trip for recycling. It's actually better to just throw it away. Except, like ELM mentioned, for the really nasty stuff like electronics that just need to keep out of the soil.